Science is a form and an institution of knowledge, a paraphrase of a phrase by historian Peter Burke in his book What is the history of knowledge? which we discussed in class last semester with a very excited class. Burke, in the paraphrased excerpt, talks about forms and institutions of knowledge found in a given culture. Knowledge in the plural, instead of science in the singular. However, the historian's plural is limited by “mains”, with science competing for the top of the podium. This is in a melting pot (the culture and values associated with it) that constitutes a system with schools, universities, laboratories, museums, the press and so on. The connections between these different parts of the system are not always well perceived, but they form what Burke called the “order of knowledge”.
The order of knowledge of science is – after a few centuries of continuous institutionalization, professionalization and disciplinaryization – quite rigid in its legitimization border for who can talk about and, mainly, do science. This rigidity, of course, is not exclusive to science, but it is there that we can perceive, if we want, various conflicts. One of them is about the location of scientific knowledge (yes, an electron is the same in any laboratory or part of the universe, but knowledge about it is generated in local contexts, laboratories. Furthermore, science is also concerned with phenomena that are unequal). Another is about the exclusion and invisibility of its actors and actresses in this system or order. As is the case of women in science, whose relevant role only began to attract more attention recently. The rigidity of science is not limited to the issue of gender, but let's start with it to understand other normally forgotten connections. Without space and, above all, the domain to discuss all the connections in the order of knowledge that is science, we can use micro-stories, small isolated entries that, finally, connect.
In somewhat random searches I first encounter little Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), a musician and astronomer like her brother Wilhelm. Small because her growth was seriously compromised by typhus, which affected her as a child in Germany. Her mother then wanted her to be a domestic servant, but her musician father suggested another path. She learned to play the violin. Upon her father's death, she joined her brothers Wilhelm and Alexander, who had moved to England, despite their mother's resistance. She began a career in music, together with Wilhelm. He became interested in astronomy and gradually stopped being a musician to become a famous astronomer. Caroline also followed in his footsteps as a self-taught artist. Together they discovered comets and nebulae that were not included in the catalogs of the time. She began recording her observations in 1782 and less than a year later made her first independent discovery. A nebula.
The whole story is rich, with disputes over who received greater recognition, her or her brother. In any case, she was the first woman to hold public office in England and the first woman to be paid for her work in astronomy. This in 1778. In 1828 she received the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, to which she was elected as a member in 1835. She received other honors during her lifetime and an asteroid discovered in 1888 bears her middle name, Lucretia. Caroline was recognized during her lifetime, although more as an assistant to her brother and not as a protagonist, and was paid to do science in a century in which this activity was far from being professionalized.
A few years before the medal for Caroline Herschel, Eunice Newton (1819-1888) was born in the United States. It wasn't just any surname. Eunice was even distantly related to Isaac Newton. Unlike the German astronomer, Eunice had some formal education in science, although without obtaining any degree. From the ages of 17 to 19 she studied at the Troy Female Seminary, which allowed her to study science subjects at the nearby Renseelear School. She was a political activist and married patent lawyer Elisha Foote. Eunice Newton Foote built a laboratory in her home, where she became the first person to confirm that certain gases exposed to sunlight warmed more than others and that rising carbon dioxide levels could raise the temperature of the atmosphere, affecting the climate, the phenomenon we know today as the greenhouse effect. She wrote a paper about it, presented in 1856 at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: it was the first scientific paper published by a woman in the United States.
Her work had repercussions at the time, being even described and praised in a column in the September 13, 1856 edition of Scientific American magazine.[I] The person who, however, took credit for discovering the greenhouse effect, a few years later, was the British physicist John Tyndall. Whether or not he was aware of Foote's work is still controversial, but the American scientist ended up in obscurity. There are several reasons cited for this: she was a woman, an amateur scientist, who in her articles did not make references to other scientists, and the United States was scientifically peripheral at the time. Other conflicts thus appear in this story, in addition to the gender issue: who is legitimized to do science and the tension between the periphery and the metropolis. These and other conflicts continue, but at least the importance and pioneering spirit of Eunice Newton Foote have been recognized, more than a century later.
At the time the greenhouse effect began to be discussed, Agnes Pockels (1862-1935) was born in Germany. Agnes was a self-taught chemist, she liked science from an early age, but at the time women were not allowed to attend universities in Germany. Her brother, a physicist, shared academic books and articles to which he had access. Therefore, she never formally studied her science of the heart, nor took on any academic role: she was what we today call a citizen scientist. Her greatest contribution was to the establishment of surface science, studying the surfaces of liquids and solids and their interfaces. Her interest in the topic, which she turned into a science, arose while washing dishes at home, observing how the soap behaved, in the bubbles and on the surface of the water in the sink. How did she cross the frontier of the order of knowledge of science? In 1891, ten years after his first measurements of surface tension, he learned that the renowned English physicist Lord Rayleigh was working on similar things. Encouraged by her brother, Agnes wrote to the eminent scientist.
The letter was in German and began: “My lord, would you kindly forgive my boldness in pestering you with a letter in German on a scientific subject?” The lord's wife translated it for her husband. Lord Rayleigh didn't bother taking what a modest amateur chemist wrote seriously and took the work to the magazine's editor Nature. This is how Agnes Pockels' first scientific article appeared. The German housewife first turned to scientists at the University of Göttingen, but they turned up their noses. She ultimately published 14 scientific articles in total and ended up being recognized, being the first woman in Germany to receive the title of Doctor Honoris Causa.
Other, perhaps more interesting, details completing the stories of these characters can be found on Wikipedia and its references. What catches my attention in the last case is the possibility (perhaps not so uncommon) of breaking the rigidity of the border, as Lord Rayleigh did, as well as the importance of curiosity, as Peter Burke points out in the book mentioned above. Curiosity in environments where we still hear the saying that curiosity killed the cat.
My rare readers, as journalist Juca Kfouri would say, could argue that this is the past and that some of the observations would be anachronistic. However, the stories continue in the 1930th century and in the current one. We can mention the virologist June Almeida (2007-XNUMX), about whom I have already written[ii]: She only completed high school, became a laboratory technician and ended up receiving a doctorate. Yes, she was the one who discovered the first coronavirus, in 1965. But I keep stumbling through the entries and would also like to mention the computational neuroscientist Walter Pitts (1923-1969). From a poor Detroit family, she dropped out of school but studied logic and mathematics as a self-taught student. At the age of 12, she wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell, who invited him to go to Cambridge University, but he did not go as he had no money. She continued to correspond with the English philosopher and attended his classes as a listener when Russell visited the University of Chicago. She interacted with other great thinkers, always studying as a listening student.[iii] Homeless, he got a job in general services, thanks to logician Rudolf Carnap. After a while, once again homeless, he was welcomed into the home of Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist and cybernetician. After that, he spent a year or two as a regular physics and engineering student and ended up as a technician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The English entry on Wikipedia presents his trajectory in detail and with references. Skipping a sequence of many contributions, we can say that artificial intelligence, which enchants or scares us today, owes a lot to the findings of Walter Pitts.
I conclude by confessing my ignorance. But a group of students, from that lively class with which I discussed knowledge and society, showed me the fascinating Antônio Bispo dos Santos (1959-2023), Nêgo Bispo.[iv] The quilombola leader, writer and philosopher only had primary education as his formal education. Otherwise he was self-taught. The relationship with the academic world was initially tense, perhaps due to some of the issues that remain from past centuries, but Bispo crossed the border. Today your book Colonization, quilombos: modes and meanings, published by the University of Brasília, has more than 700 citations, according to Google Scholar.
At a time when what seems to be worth more are spreadsheets with great indicators, perhaps we should consider the few examples presented here not as exceptions, but as a possibility to be promoted in the relationship between sciences and their “others”.[v]
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
[I] The column is worth reading, which in the first paragraph notes: “Due to the nature of women's duties, few of them have had the leisure or opportunity to pursue science experimentally, but those who have had the pleasure and opportunity to do so have demonstrated both power and capacity to investigate and observe correctly like men.”
[ii] https://www.unicamp.br/unicamp/index.php/ju/artigos/peter-schulz/pequenas-historias-de-virus-cientistas-e-ciencia
[iii] I remember that I took some classes as a listener back in 1980, but I heard that this is no longer allowed. I don't have the courage to confirm this information, due to the absurdity it represents.
